Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Tatjana Paunović: INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: ...
(Canagarajah 2005: 944) are essential skills for a successful intercultural communicator.
Therefore, both should be included in foreign language teaching and
teacher education.
In the following section, after a brief review of some relevant research, we
describe the present study, which resulted from the implementation of an undergraduate
course explicitly aiming at enhancing future EFL teachers’ intercultural
communicative competence and intercultural sensitivity, as part of their university
education and pre-service teacher training.
2. Relevant research
Research focusing on various aspects of intercultural communicative competence
is in remarkable expansion in areas as diverse as social psychology, pedagogy, social
work, healthcare, nursing, or management, but, unfortunately, still not quite
so in language studies and language teacher education.
Focusing on the teacher’s perspective, Jokikokko (2005) reports the findings
of a study in which the interview technique was used to investigate how
the concepts of diversity and intercultural competence were understood by interculturally
trained Finnish teachers (Jokikokko 2005: 80). Her findings showed
that teachers considered ‘openness, tolerance, appreciation of diversity, critical
thinking, creativity, and patience [...] as preconditions for intercultural interactions’
(Jokikokko 2005: 76). Skopinskaja (2007), investigating Estonian teachers’
opinions, points out that ICC represents a new challenge for L2 teachers,
and that the process is ‘determined by teachers’ attitudes as much as by official
curriculum requirements and course-book structure’. Schuerholz-Lehr (2007)
presents the outcomes of a two-year professional development workshop project
for the teaching staff at a Canadian university, which aimed to ‘help instructors
to include an international dimension into their course design’ (Schuerholz-Lehr
2007: 181). Sanderson (2008) discusses the necessity of the ‘internationalization
of the academic self’ in higher education, ‘through critically reflective and
selfrefl ective processes’ (Sanderson 2008: 276).
Tusting and colleagues (2002) analysed generalizations about gender and
culture ‘made in a large corpus of diary, questionnaire, focus group and interview
data produced by modern languages students at university in Britain’, during
or shortly after their residence abroad. The data were transcribed and coded by
topic, using a ‘grounded’ approach. The authors state that the students showed a
remarkable reluctance to using stereotypical images, even when given permission
to (in interviews), and always sought for specific examples to support generalizations,
most commonly from personal experience.
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